Bluetooth Foot Pedal for Onsong – an alternative to Airturn ?

Project History!

The intention of this post is to serve as an aide-memoire for a little project I’ve been working on recently.

From time to time, I lead worship at my church, and play acoustic guitar. For song lyrics / chord charts I use a popular app on IOS called Onsong.

A while ago I found an old guitar foot switch unit that started life belonging to a Marshall amp. I took most of it’s inwards out and wired up a simple Bluetooth keyboard to the 4 main switches, and then in turn, paired this with my Ipad. Within Onsong settings, I configured the footpedal options to respond to “keyboard” presses – u = Up, d = down, n = next song .and p = previous song.

So far so good…..apart from one bug-bear. When IOS detects an external keyboard, it disables the on-screen keyboard functionality – a feature I use to add sticky notes, edit chord charts and so on.

And thus this project was born….to find a better way of doing this. The result ? An Arduino based board that transmits MIDI notes over Bluetooth Low Energy.

Now, I am the first to admit that I am not a “programmer” by any means and so the Arduino sketch part of the project contained much stumbling in the dark – along with lots of cross referencing to the following guides:

So when I wire it up, I get nothing. I’m using the 3v3 power (it is going to be USB powered). Maybe I am confused on the wiring of the SPST? How do you have power going through this? It looks like the battery is going to ground, and is sometimes diverted through the SPST to DataPins. But I don’t get any readings out of those pins when I connect mine.

Hi Eric. I use mine with a small battery for portability, and then charge via USB. It’s been a while since I needed to work on mine so my memory is a little vague right now. I’ll try and pop the cover off later today to check .

Though the code you have posted doesn’t work for me. I can’t get it to show up on my iPad. I have some code running on mine that pairs it like it was a keyboard, and then forScore is set to respond to N and P for next and previous. But this way it kills the onscreen keyboard on the iPad when it’s connected. I suppose that isn’t a huge deal if I’m using it on a gig.

Cool. Glad you’re making progress. My previous version of my pedal was based on a Bluetooth keyboard inside the pedal, and that too worked by sending keystrokes which had the same limitation you describe where it prevents the iOS keyboard showing up as the iPad thinks it has an external keyboard attached.
Do you have yours attempting to send Midi?